Back in the olden days when I was still in high-school living with my mom and brothers, I stumbled upon an extra garage door opener. We were living in a condo complex with at least 50 units.
This thing was old and already kind of falling apart, so I decided to open it up just for kicks and see what mystery circuitry lie beneath.
This is pretty much what it looked like.
Buttons and basic circuitry... no surprises there...
but why does it have 12 switches?
Can this thing really be customized?
So I flipped a bit and pushed the button, nothing happened.
I flipped it back and pushed the button: my garage door opened.
Ah, I see what's happening here...
Everyone in the complex has the same garage door opener, each one is set to a different frequency so that it only opens one garage door. Interesting little system of efficiency and mass production right there. So easily exploitable with so little robustness...
"Wait, does that mean I can use this opener to hack every single garage door here?"
My guess was: yes. This thing only had like 10 bits on it, which means the total number of combination locks was only like 2^10 (1024). The range on this thing was far enough to reach at least 10-15 garage doors, so on average I'd only have to try less than 100 combinations to hack one of them.
So away I went!
I flipped every bit to off (0) and started going down the line in sequential order:
0: 0000000000
1: 0000000001
2: 0000000010
3: 0000000011
4: 0000000100
5: 0000000101
6: 0000000110
7: 0000000111
8: 0000001000
9: 0000001001
10: 0000001010
...
...
...
Eventually...
Boom! One of the garage doors opened.
Success! Victory! I did it! I'm smart!
And what do I see inside of the garage I just opened?
A purse hanging 3 feet off the ground with keys hanging out of it next to a sports car... lol what the hell?
I'm I being tested right now?
Who does that? Who leaves their purse inside the garage with the keys hanging out of them like that? And a sports car? What is going on here? I seriously felt like I was somehow being baited even though that's obviously impossible. I closed the door. Not today: Satan!
I wrote down the secret code and continued on.
One by one, I unlocked at least half of the doors there. I figured I must have missed some from the signal being too weak or the opener might have been a different model.
After I was done hacking at least 7 garage doors and writing down the secret codes, I decided to try again at a later date in another section of the complex. Why try to crack the doors that didn't open the first time around when I have all these fresh ones over here?
Again, I had a lot of success and it actually didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would. I was using this small screwdriver to flip the bits and the switches became easier to flip as they started wearing down and I got quicker with the small twitch movements required. I knew these surgeon hands were good for something!
Third try's a charm!
So on my third session someone apparently saw me tinkering around being shady and I think the cops were even called. I can't remember how I know this because I definitely did not have to deal with the cops. I may have seen them pulling in after I was done. Too slow, coppers! Classic example of response time failure! Score 1 for 'hackers'.
Unsurprisingly that was the end of my little experiment.
I had a good run and access to like 20-30 garage doors! What was the point of it all? Like many brute-force attacks, there was no point. Your security sucked and I broke it! Get wrecked, noobs!
What can I say? I was bored.
Still, I feel like this story applies to other aspects of life. People think they have security/privacy when they really have very little. Either that or the security/privacy that does exist is paper thin and can easily be violated with little effort.
In fact apparently if you know what you are doing (I don't) you can build a device that blasts out thousands of frequencies all at once, driving down the street just opening random garage doors left and right. You can also boost the signal so that the range on such a device shoots out for miles, especially if you're located at the top of a hill. Location location location.
Privacy
Hell, we are all walking around with super computers in our pockets that pinpoint our exact location while tracking a multitude of other data points. Many of us willingly allow dozens of corporations to access this information freely, and there are plenty of other entities that take the information by force without so much as a whisper.
The tech companies are in on it, and no one cares.
It is an uncontested fact that webcams can be turned on and used as spying devices without the device's light coming on. That's not some tricky hack, that's a straight up backdoor purposefully programmed into the protocol, and we all accept this reality because what are we going to do about it? Stop buying tech? Ha! Yeah right!
Crypto crypto crypto
It all comes back to decentralized robust systems. Multiple backups and layers of security. Modular architecture that can be tinkered with. And most of all: trust (or trustless networks).
Many kids would not have tinkered like I did "just for fun". But what if they were being paid to tinker? Paid to figure these things out and manipulate them? Paid to learn and even paid to exercise... This seems like an unescapable reality to me at this point. It's either that or go to public school while being scanned and tracked at all times while learning how best to put glitter on poster-board. All of the old ways of doing things are experiencing massive diminishing returns.
When it really comes down to it, the legacy economy has no way to compete with the new paradigm.
- Eliminating the middle man and being our own central bank.
- Being paid to learn rather than exponential college expenses.
- Being paid to be healthy rather than offered cheap garbage food.
- Building communities that care rather than promoting this rat-race of stepping on those who are less fortunate.
- Synergy over competition.
- Abundance over scarcity.
It's really hard to imagine everything changing when these things are happening slowly and one at a time. However, once that tipping point gets reached, everything will happen quickly and all at once. The disruption to legacy systems will be unfathomable even though we can see it coming. The complexity of it all is astounding.
That's why I chuckle when people say things like:
- Just because Bitcoin is scarce doesn't mean it has value.
- Crypto is not scarce because anyone can make one.
This was never about scarcity.
The entire point was abundance.
The value is in the network/community, not "scarcity".
No one can copy a community.
- If Bitcoin succeeds the whales will simply be the new owners of the world!
Again, completely ignoring everything about how the world works. Fiat never solved the double-spend attack. Bitcoin did: and solving the Byzantine General's Problem was a literal mathematical miracle.
To say that Bitcoin whales will just be the new people in charge is absolutely absurd. They have to spend money to control the world. After they spend the Bitcoin they no longer have the Bitcoin. It's not like living under these financial dictatorships where the entire world is legit under double-spend attack 24/7.
Central banks can just print more money and spend it whenever they want by design. I won't even attempt to parse counterfeiting and other types of fraud. The fiat system is already flawed to the core even in its most ideal state of existence. To make this claim that Bitcoin is just more of the same is synonymous to simply claiming ignorance about how this financial system actually operates.
But Bitcoin isn't even decentralized!
What's not decentralized?
The distribution?
The network?
The mining?
The upgrades?
The security?
All of the above!!!1
Compared to what?
This is not a black or white pass/fail issue. Decentralization is a spectrum. You can't say anything is decentralized or centralized without comparing it to something else on the spectrum.
Would we say green isn't light because it's not blue or red? Would we say that bisexual men do not exist because those are really just gay men in denial? That is literally an argument that people try to make, and it only makes sense in the context of everything having two binary options. Welcome to the real world, friends.
50 shades of gray.
As much as we like to classify things and put them into their little boxes so they can be easier to understand: that is simply just not how the world works. Force a square peg into a round hole and see what happens. The result is not legitimate.
I can easily make the argument that central banking is decentralized. There are many central banks, not just one. That makes it decentralized. There are many people that control each central bank. That makes it decentralized. There are many banks and other entities that receive the loans from central banks, who in turn distribute that money to exponentially more entities. All of these factors make central banking more decentralized than they would be otherwise.
So when we hear someone say that Bitcoin or such-and-such network isn't decentralized, we need to immediately ask: 'compared to what'? Because it is sure as hell x1000 times more decentralized than the system we have going for us right now.
Oh, I'm sorry, is it not decentralized compared to the most ideal viewpoint possible? Get over yourself. We are looking for solutions: not idealists. Get out of here with that impossible Utopia of yours. It ain't happening. Gonna throw the baby out with the bathwater and then replace it with an impossible idea that will never come to fruition? Get real. Grow up.
Conclusion
Humanity itself has reached a tipping point of diminishing returns. Doing the most efficient thing for the least amount of money no longer makes sense in a wide array of contexts, no matter what free-market capitalists claim. We now require inefficient systems that we can trust in order to scale up, instead of trimming the fat and creating sleek streamlined products that have little to no wiggle room.
This new paradigm is hitting us from multiple angles. Even the economy itself cries out for change as jobs evaporate while the ones that remain pay less compensation. If only we could create self-sustaining systems that required immense redundancy. That way there would be an infinite amount of work to be done at all times while creating a system that has very few attack vectors.
The only fat we need to trim now rests at the top of this morbidly obese inverted pyramid.
Up is down and down is up: don't worry about it!